In the End
by Alfirin1986
Summary: At the end of the Reaper War Shepard adjusts to just how much she really lost, and she ends up back where she started. In-progress.
1. Chapter 1

Loving Commander Shepard who's fighting the Reapers, kicking ass and taking names isn't the same as loving Commander Shepard who fought the Reapers, got her ass kicked, and feels more broken than triumphant. That kind of experience changes a person. Changes people. And you don't realize it until it's after the fact because you've been so damn focused on everything but yourself.

It leaves a bitter taste in one's mouth, ill-fitting pieces that just can't be forced back together again. What was it Miranda had said? _Even if we pull this off everything will be different_.

She had been right.

Priorities change when the biggest threat to the galaxy isn't synthetic life forms intent on wiping civilization off the map. People spend their time rebuilding instead of running, looking for food instead of ammo. Time feels like a precious commodity now. If you don't keep your eye on it you'll lose it. Or someone will steal it out from under you. Time is no longer there to be wasted. The Reapers had convinced the galaxy of that.

But that's the funny thing about time. It's not really there to lose. Time can be made, and it doesn't take any expensive materials to do it. It just takes a willing heart.

If it's important enough the time will be there; it will be found.

If it's not? Well then people are just shit out of luck. Even beat up old soldiers that had given it all.

When it's over, really over, things are different no matter how much time was spent wishing they weren't. Sighs full of bottled-up fear and hopelessness were released. Families began rebuilding the shattered remnants of their pasts while figuring out their futures.

A once rogue C-Sec agent returned to the family that had survived the onslaught, ready to help a planet rebuild. A young quarian who had just been a kid on her pilgrimage at the start of the war rose up as an Admiral prepared to help her people settle on the home planet they had lost centuries ago. And friends who had seen it all together parted ways with a tense nod, because sometimes when the death of loved ones lay between two people even the best of friends have to find a way to accept it. Or not accept it. Only time would tell.

And lovers would find that love, despite the promise in all those poets' prose and all those writers' musings wasn't always strong enough to withstand. Sometimes duty came first even when the opposite had been promised. Because loving someone in war time isn't the same as loving them in peace time. Especially an old soldier with more war wounds than happy memories.

The Alliance had wanted her to come back to work. They'd give her all the time she needed to heal before they put her back in her blues. The galaxy needed her, they said. She could still do a world of good.

But she'd already done a world of good, and she'd come to realize that the galaxy would never stop needing someone. It didn't have to be her. She was just convenient. Brass had taken her formal resignation like it was some kind of joke; like in a few months she'd realize that she was needed too much to walk away. That was fine with her. Let them think she was just going through a phase as she boarded a shuttle headed out to the Attican Traverse.

Away from everything she knew. Back to everything she had once known…a long time ago.

Time made many promises it had never intended to keep, and maybe eventually it would heal old wounds. Or maybe it was all a trick. A way to lure a person into believing things would get better.

Or maybe it was just about letting yourself believe.

Looking out over an old planet she hadn't stepped foot on for decades, she thought maybe that wasn't enough.

"There are no happy endings," Shepard muttered to herself as she stepped off the transport.

"What was that?"

She shook her head at the lieutenant beside her, "Nothing, just… nothing."_Just an old soldier coming home_.

He studied her for a moment too long before saluting her. "Welcome home to Mindoir, Commander."

This planet hadn't been home in a very long time, or maybe her coming back meant it had been even when she thought it hadn't.

She heaved out a heavy sigh.

Time played cruel tricks indeed.


	2. Chapter 2

It was that stupid hole in the fence that saved her in the end. The one her dad had been after her for days to fix. The one that was still there all these long years later.

The task had been hers to complete, and hers alone. The goats were her responsibility and the fence that had been damaged was part of their pasture. _The goats are going to get out,_ her father warned her. She acted like she didn't care. It could be attributed to that sense of entitlement teenagers have. That stubborn refusal to do anything their parents asked that didn't benefit them outright. She'd always meant to get it done eventually, but never in the moment she was asked. _I'll get to it later,_ she always told him.

It was the one decision she regretted and was thankful for all at once.

The night had been dark, the new moon making the shadows deeper and more menacing. She had wanted to be snug in her bed but her father had given her an ultimatum—fix the fence by morning or be grounded for two weeks, and there was a cute boy in town that had her pulling on her boots and grabbing one of the power cells she'd need for the tools and the lantern.

She had whistled for the Bowser, the family dog, but the old hound had been asleep in front of the heater and had ignored her.

She was in the barn when she'd heard the first shot. It startled her, making her drop the lantern, which clattered against the stone floor and went out with a hiss. She heard Bowser bark once and then stop.

"Dad?" she called out, thinking it could have been a fuse blowing. The circuit breaker was out in the barn so she expected him out in just a moment to reset it.

The volley of shots that followed quickly banished that thought.

She still hears them just as she did that night, angry and violent bursts of sound followed by people screaming. People she knew. People she loved.

She could hear her brothers' voices and she told herself they fell silent because they had found a place to hide. She heard her mother begging someone to stop. There was fear in her mother's voice and that scared Shepard more than anything. Her mother wasn't afraid of anything.

She never heard her father. Not once. Back then as a scared sixteen year old on Mindoir listening to her family get slaughtered she had wondered why. She had wondered how he would be silent through it all. It was only later that she would realize that very first shot had been for him.

When the blasts stopped the night grew so silent that she wasn't sure this wasn't anything but a bad dream.

_You'll wake up and you'll be back in your bed. You'll be grounded but this will all just be a bad dream._

Her feet moved of their own accord as she ghosted back towards the house in a daze. Yes, this had to just be a bad dream.

"Boss, there's a third room. There's another kid. A girl." A grating voice had pulled her back to the present.

There were strange men in her house—strange men who would be looking for her.

_Run. _A voice whispered in her head. _Run. Run! RUN!_

So she had run though, even as she heard the crashes of her house being ransacked as they searched for her. Even as she heard the distant blasts and gunfire that told her what had happened to her family was happening to others.

She had run straight through the fields to that stupid hole in the fence and dove through it like a batter sliding into home plate. She tore her clothes and cut her side open, but in that moment, high on adrenaline and heart pounding with fear she hadn't felt it.

The forest had stood before her, full of dangers her parents had always warned her against, but certain death had been nipping at her heels so she fled into their depths. The Alliance patrol that found her had had a medic with them, and she had been lucky. Infection had rendered her nearly unconscious and completely indefensible.

"She's a survivor," she heard them say through the fever.

"She must be a fighter to have escaped them. Poor kid has gone through a lot."

But they had been wrong. She hadn't been a fighter, and she wasn't a kid anymore. Shepard had been a child when she'd gone out to the barn that night. By the time the sun capped the horizon the next morning she'd been an adult. She'd had to grow up in the blink of an eye. There was no one left to watch out for her but herself.

Maybe that's why she joined the Alliance as soon as she'd turned eighteen. Life among their ranks wasn't easy, but it provided her with a sense of family she'd missed desperately. After Mindoir she had been strict with herself. Strict about everything. She was at the top of her cadet class, and she expected more of herself than anyone else.

She'd sworn to herself that she'd never allow what happened on Mindoir to happen to her again, and she swore she'd never set foot on that planet again. But despite all of her planning, fate had had other plans.

Didn't it always?

Akuze. Virmire. The Reaper War.

And fate brought her full circle. She was home on Mindoir, sitting next to the hole that had saved and changed her life in an instant, shedding tears that had been waiting a lifetime to fall.


End file.
